Basu: HIV, gun stories show safety laws lack consistency

Sep. 14, 2013

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When it comes to protecting public safety, Iowa laws can be wildly inconsistent, either going too far or not far enough. Legislators, responding to big-money lobbying or emotionally loaded appeals over common sense, have left the public unprotected, at the same time that they demand too great a price of people who didn’t harm anyone.

Consider two news stories last week.

One involved a case before the Iowa Court of Appeals that is centered on Iowa’s law on criminal transmission of HIV, a felony that, despite its name, does not require someone to have actually transmitted the virus to be convicted. The other story revealed that Iowa issues permits to blind people to carry guns.

In the appeals court case, Nick Rhoades, 39, is trying to have his 2009 guilty plea to criminal transmission of HIV voided, claiming he entered it on bad advice from his lawyer. Rhoades had sex with another man one night without telling him he had the virus. He used a condom, however, and no HIV was transmitted, nor was it intended to be. But Rhoades was arrested after the man he’d met online learned of his positive status and called police.

Rhoades was sentenced to 25 years in prison and required to register as a sex offender, though a doctor at one time testified on his behalf that he had a “medically undetectable viral load” and the risk of transmission “may well have been zero.” Rhoades’ current appeal claims his first lawyer never even spoke with his HIV specialist. A judge later reduced his sentence to probation. But he remains on the sex offender registry, which affects where he can live, whom he can be around and, of course, his reputation.

A person who has sex with another knowing he has HIV but not disclosing it can be called various things: deceptive, selfish, scared, unethical. But a sex offender? If the state wants to criminalize that kind of secrecy, there should be other ways of doing it. A conviction for transmission should require actually having transmitted something. Yet the 1998 law was passed in the heat of emotion when AIDS was believed to be an automatic death sentence and gay sex was highly stigmatized.

So you’d think that a state so concerned with protecting people from death and disease would carry that concern into other areas, such as protecting against bullets being misfired. But under a 2010 Iowa law pushed by the National Rifle Association, no one can be denied a permit to carry a gun except under certain narrowly defined circumstances, such as a felony conviction. Physical disability, such as blindness, doesn’t count as a basis for denial. The law requires just taking a training course and demonstrating knowledge of firearm safety. But the Register reported that a free online course approved for that teaches no safety and doesn’t require any demonstrated skill in gun use.

Thanks to advocacy, public education and the Americans with Disabilities Act, blind and visually impaired people cannot be discriminated against, which is a wonderful thing. They must be accommodated in workplaces, allowing them to do most things other people do, with the exception of drive. But common sense would dictate that if you can’t see — or can’t see well — you shouldn’t be firing guns. The potential for needless loss of life or injury is simply too great.

It could be a case of mistaken identity, a bullet hitting the wrong person, or the wrong part of a person if the goal is self-defense. This is no more a civil rights matter than prohibiting a woman seeking a driver’s license from being photographed with only her eyes showing under her burqua is. It’s a practical one, designed for public safety.

But the NRA has enormous clout. A massive campaign it funded succeeded last week in getting two Colorado state senators, both Democrats, defeated for helping to pass new gun laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook school tragedy. The restrictions that Colorado Senate President John Morse and Sen. Angela Giron had supported included expanded background checks for private gun sales and a ban on the sale of ammunition magazines holding more than 15 rounds.

Now, buoyed by its recent successes, the NRA is pushing for more in Iowa. An organization called Iowa Gun Owners claims in an email that it is preparing to “meet the gun grabbers in Iowa head on” in the next legislative session by preventing the ban of 30-round-magazine rifles like the AR-15 that are banned in other states. The organization is even giving such a rifle away in a drawing.

It’s bad enough that our state criminalizes sex while permitting someone who can’t see to carry and shoot a lethal weapon. Both laws should be rescinded. Don’t let your lawmakers go even further. Tell them you can’t support someone so unreasonably beholden to special interests over safety.